DartNode $13.99 Flash Deal: The 9Gbps Houston Firehose vs. The 5 IOPS Soda Straw

yoursunny · February 15

We managed to snag one of the 10 Flash Deal units from the 2025 Black Friday / Cyber Monday megathread.
After nearly three months of ownership, we’ve realized this isn't just a VPS—it’s a performance art piece dedicated to the sheer absurdity of budget hosting.

The Legend of Daniel

First off, we haven't canceled this out of pure respect for Daniel.
Rumor has it he's pulling 14-hour shifts racking hardware at TRG Houston One.
Because of our ongoing tickets regarding the shared IPv6 /64 and the VNC "FIN" packet issue, the team agreed to not start our 1-year billing clock until things are fixed.
Effectively, we are hosting a 10Gbps static site for free while the billing clock stays frozen in time.

The "Blink" Metric

Forget IOPS. we're introducing a new Houston-standard benchmark: The Blink.

Standard Login: 13 cursor blinks before a prompt appears.
Optimized Login (--norc): 1-4 blinks.
The VNC Experience: A perfect 10-minute countdown until the server sends a TCP FIN packet and ghosts you. It’s not a bug; it’s a "focus timer."

The Benchmark Roast

We ran a full suite of fio and networking tests.
The results are a digital coma:

YABS: ✔ Online (/32) / ✔ Online (/128), IPv6 available yeah!
nws.sh: near-line-rate 10Gbps awesomeness. We hit 9.2 Gbps peak to Miami. The network firehose is so wide that it can deliver a 40GB Blu-ray in 35 seconds—shame the disk needs 57 minutes to write it.
latency-check: A 9,029ms maximum clat on random reads. It doesn't lag; it goes to the afterlife and back.
mixed-workload: The 6 Gbps network is ~2000x faster than the 3 Mbps disk.
max-throughput: Big reads hit 3.5 GB/s (Ferrari engine), but random 4k hits 1.8 MB/s (square wheels).
sustained-write: 5 IOPS. 2001 called; they want their USB 1.1 flash drive back.

The "Art Piece" Live Gallery

Since the disk had a literal 133-second stroke during a 10GB write test, we've moved the entire site to a RAM buffer served by Caddy.
It now loads at the full 9.2 Gbps peak capacity of the Snaju network, completely bypassing the Houston rust.

View our gallery: https://freaky-fast-digital-coma.yoursunny.dev

Disclaimer:
Announcement and poll options were written by Google AI based on real benchmark results, which can be access from the above website.
This page is a tribute to the hustle and grind, not a complaint about the hardware.
No Daniel was harmed in making this art piece.

fluffernutter · February 15

it makes me deeply sad to see you use ai for stuff like this i always thought you were funny without it

yoursunny · February 15

@fluffernutter said:
it makes me deeply sad to see you use ai for stuff like this i always thought you were funny without it

On this DartNode, we have invested:

3 hours in writing tickets
5 hours in installing Debian 13 while fighting VNC disconnects
2 hours in gathering logs regarding VNC FIN packet issue
4 hours in executing benchmarks

We don't have any push-ups left for the write-up, hence we delegated the task to our digital assistant.

JabJab · February 15

So RAM is fast my dude! Buy more RAM, like 64GB, create RAM-disk only server.
Everything fast.

yoursunny · February 16

@JabJab said:
So RAM is fast my dude! Buy more RAM, like 64GB, create RAM-disk only server.
Everything fast.

We can't afford to buy more RAM, but there's always https://downloadmoreram.com/ .
Downloading RAM at 9Gbps is definitely faster than mounting the /swapfile at 5 IOPS.

Remember the day VirBot sold 12GB RAM with 5GB NVMe?

yoursunny · February 16

Update: the "art gallery" now offers realtime vmstat diagrams showing CPU iowait and steal values.
https://freaky-fast-digital-coma.yoursunny.dev/

Screenshot:

Source code:
https://github.com/yoursunny/freaky-fast-digital-coma

yoursunny · February 26

Artwork currently offline because VPS cannot power on.
When Daniel wakes up he'll press the power buttons, we hope.
Meanwhile, we did 9 push-ups in sync with the 9Gbps firehose.

zed · February 26

lol this is still going on?

yoursunny · February 26

@zed said:
lol this is still going on?

The SSH connection is currently 3 blinks, ending with "no route to host".
Will you do 3 push-ups for Daniel?

yoursunny · February 27

Artwork is back online after 15 hours of outage (since we added UptimeRobot when we posted the offline notice).
Digital coma continues it's 23 IOPS.
https://serververify.com/benchmarks/c5f04510-1e62-4817-84d8-51f6992875f2

# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
#              Yet-Another-Bench-Script              #
#                     v2025-04-20                    #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #

Fri Feb 27 05:31:12 UTC 2026

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Uptime     : 0 days, 12 hours, 4 minutes
Processor  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2697A v4 @ 2.60GHz
CPU cores  : 2 @ 2599.996 MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled
RAM        : 3.8 GiB
Swap       : 0.0 KiB
Disk       : 99.9 GiB
Distro     : Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Kernel     : 6.12.73+deb13-amd64
VM Type    : KVM
IPv4/IPv6  : ✔ Online / ✔ Online

IPv6 Network Information:
---------------------------------
ISP        : Snaju Development
ASN        : AS399646 Snaju Development
Location   : Houston, Texas (TX)
Country    : United States

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/sda5):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 2.02 MB/s      (505) | 20.65 MB/s     (322)
Write      | 2.04 MB/s      (510) | 21.12 MB/s     (330)
Total      | 4.06 MB/s     (1.0k) | 41.78 MB/s     (652)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 5.68 MB/s       (11) | 26.40 MB/s      (25)
Write      | 6.24 MB/s       (12) | 29.15 MB/s      (28)
Total      | 11.93 MB/s      (23) | 55.56 MB/s      (53)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed      | Ping           
-----           | -----                     | ----            | ----            | ----           
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 856 Mbits/sec   | 1.78 Gbits/sec  | 107 ms         
Eranium         | Amsterdam, NL (100G)      | 1.24 Gbits/sec  | 1.62 Gbits/sec  | 114 ms         
Uztelecom       | Tashkent, UZ (10G)        | 692 Mbits/sec   | 999 Mbits/sec   | 209 ms         
Leaseweb        | Singapore, SG (10G)       | 566 Mbits/sec   | 586 Mbits/sec   | 217 ms         
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 3.60 Gbits/sec  | 4.13 Gbits/sec  | 37.7 ms        
Leaseweb        | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 4.31 Gbits/sec  | 4.54 Gbits/sec  | 39.0 ms        
Edgoo           | Sao Paulo, BR (1G)        | 1.06 Gbits/sec  | 1.53 Gbits/sec  | 135 ms         

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv6):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed      | Ping           
-----           | -----                     | ----            | ----            | ----           
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 1.51 Gbits/sec  | 882 Mbits/sec   | 117 ms         
Eranium         | Amsterdam, NL (100G)      | 1.37 Gbits/sec  | 1.95 Gbits/sec  | 114 ms         
Uztelecom       | Tashkent, UZ (10G)        | 681 Mbits/sec   | 939 Mbits/sec   | 209 ms         
Leaseweb        | Singapore, SG (10G)       | 637 Mbits/sec   | 823 Mbits/sec   | --             
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 4.39 Gbits/sec  | 4.64 Gbits/sec  | 37.6 ms        
Leaseweb        | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 4.13 Gbits/sec  | 4.77 Gbits/sec  | 38.9 ms        
Edgoo           | Sao Paulo, BR (1G)        | 1.09 Gbits/sec  | 1.49 Gbits/sec  | 135 ms         

Geekbench 6 Benchmark Test:
---------------------------------
Test            | Value                         
                |                               
Single Core     | 605                           
Multi Core      | 1096                          
Full Test       | https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16771735

YABS completed in 25 min 4 sec

yoursunny · February 27

This was just in:

[DartNode Network Alert] Case #20 SSD-2 Drive Failure

Hardware Issue Notification — SSD-2 Drive Failure

We are notifying you of a hardware issue that may impact your services at DartNode. Our team is working to address this as quickly as possible.

Started At
2/27/2026 21:00 UTC

Expected Resolution
2/28/2026 00:00 UTC

Details

Our team has identified that a drive (/dev/sdj) in the RAID md0 array is in a failure state. To prevent further issues and restore the system to full health, we are establishing an emergency maintenance window, effective immediately.

Please be advised that customers may experience temporary downtime while we replace the drive and synchronize the array. We will provide another status update as soon as the restoration is complete.

Thanks,
DartNode NOC Team

The artwork was offline for about an hour, right after this notice, but has since recovered.
We peeked vmstat for a minute, on a mostly idle server, and saw iowait shoot up to 16 briefly.

Noct · February 27

@fluffernutter said:
it makes me deeply sad to see you use ai for stuff like this i always thought you were funny without it

Boom. Exactly.

@yoursunny said:

We don't have any push-ups left for the write-up, hence we delegated the task to our digital assistant.

You succeeded in drawing sunny out from behind the cloud, @fluffernutter

forest · February 28

They may be enabling QEMU's emulated hardware watchdog for all customers soon, which should help somewhat with reliability, given the VMs don't like to reboot on their own without manual intervention.

yoursunny · April 6

@yoursunny said:
Because of our ongoing tickets regarding the shared IPv6 /64 and the VNC "FIN" packet issue, the team agreed to not start our 1-year billing clock until things are fixed.
Effectively, we are hosting a 10Gbps static site for free while the billing clock stays frozen in time.

Update: our billing clock thawed on 2026-03-01, followed the resolution of VNC errors.

There seems to be a significant congestion today.
SSH will not connect, regardless of how many blinks we wait.

Murata_Chink_Best · April 6

Yo-sunny, long time no see

erisgreyrat · April 6

tux · April 6

In Houston we have a problem.

yoursunny · May 7

IOPS increased somewhat but still far from NVMe speeds.
10Gbps fire hose has been choked.

# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
#              Yet-Another-Bench-Script              #
#                     v2026-04-29                    #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #

Wed May  6 23:42:28 UTC 2026

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Uptime     : 13 days, 5 hours, 54 minutes
Processor  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2697A v4 @ 2.60GHz
CPU cores  : 2 @ 2599.996 MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled
RAM        : 3.8 GiB
Swap       : 0.0 KiB
Disk       : 99.9 GiB
Distro     : Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Kernel     : 6.12.74+deb13+1-amd64
VM Type    : KVM
IPv4/IPv6  : ✔ Online / ✔ Online

IPv6 Network Information:
---------------------------------
ISP        : Snaju Development
ASN        : AS399646 Snaju Development
Host       : Snaju Development
Location   : Houston, Texas (TX)
Country    : United States

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/sda5):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 6.58 MB/s     (1.6k) | 46.18 MB/s     (721)
Write      | 6.59 MB/s     (1.6k) | 46.47 MB/s     (726)
Total      | 13.18 MB/s    (3.2k) | 92.65 MB/s    (1.4k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 12.79 MB/s      (24) | 48.46 MB/s      (47)
Write      | 14.08 MB/s      (27) | 52.02 MB/s      (50)
Total      | 26.87 MB/s      (51) | 100.48 MB/s     (97)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed      | Ping           
-----           | -----                     | ----            | ----            | ----           
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 778 Mbits/sec   | 402 Mbits/sec   | 104 ms         
Eranium         | Amsterdam, NL (100G)      | 809 Mbits/sec   | 673 Mbits/sec   | 114 ms         
Uztelecom       | Tashkent, UZ (10G)        | 703 Mbits/sec   | 253 Mbits/sec   | 200 ms         
Leaseweb        | Singapore, SG (10G)       | 642 Mbits/sec   | 259 Mbits/sec   | 240 ms         
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 803 Mbits/sec   | 536 Mbits/sec   | 37.9 ms        
Leaseweb        | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 759 Mbits/sec   | 511 Mbits/sec   | 39.1 ms        
Edgoo           | Sao Paulo, BR (1G)        | 789 Mbits/sec   | 299 Mbits/sec   | 143 ms         

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv6):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed      | Ping           
-----           | -----                     | ----            | ----            | ----           
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 779 Mbits/sec   | 332 Mbits/sec   | 104 ms         
Eranium         | Amsterdam, NL (100G)      | 804 Mbits/sec   | 715 Mbits/sec   | 114 ms         
Uztelecom       | Tashkent, UZ (10G)        | 720 Mbits/sec   | 265 Mbits/sec   | 200 ms         
Leaseweb        | Singapore, SG (10G)       | 568 Mbits/sec   | 186 Mbits/sec   | 239 ms         
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 767 Mbits/sec   | busy            | 37.9 ms        
Leaseweb        | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 746 Mbits/sec   | 553 Mbits/sec   | 39.1 ms        
Edgoo           | Sao Paulo, BR (1G)        | 786 Mbits/sec   | 381 Mbits/sec   | 143 ms         

Geekbench 6 Benchmark Test:
---------------------------------
Test            | Value                         
                |                               
Single Core     |                               
Multi Core      |                               
Full Test       | https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17900895

YABS completed in 19 min 18 sec

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories

In this Discussion

DartNode $13.99 Flash Deal: The 9Gbps Houston Firehose vs. The 5 IOPS Soda Straw

The Legend of Daniel

The "Blink" Metric

The Benchmark Roast

The "Art Piece" Live Gallery

Comments

Hardware Issue Notification — SSD-2 Drive Failure

Howdy, Stranger!

Quick Links

Categories

In this Discussion

DartNode $13.99 Flash Deal: The 9Gbps Houston Firehose vs. The 5 IOPS Soda Straw

The Legend of Daniel

The "Blink" Metric

The Benchmark Roast

The "Art Piece" Live Gallery

Comments

Hardware Issue Notification — SSD-2 Drive Failure